How Can the Solstice Pod Benefit Your Organization?

The answer to how the Solstice Pod will make your meetings better, great even, is likely locked away somewhere deep in your memory. Remember the days before Power Point – where a group of people would bring in reports, charts, diagrams, PENS and PAPER? People would talk to each other as a group, pieces of paper would fly across the conference table, stacks were made, and notes were taken. As far as presenting ideas and content, the process was more organic, more democratic.

Skip ahead a few years and technology makes its presence known in the meeting room, just like in every other nook and cranny of the business arena. But AV technology, for all of its advances from the mid 90’s until now, has never really solved the problem of how to recreate the type of collaboration that existed before the era of the video cable.

So how do we get back to the democratic, ad hoc way we used to communicate in meetings? How do we recreate the natural flow of information, which is richer and more engaging than a tethered one-to-many presentation? How do we recreate an interactive experience of shared content that can be organized, stacked, or moved aside?

The Solstice Pod was designed to address modern inefficiencies in collaboration that have been created by technology. But isn’t Solstice a software solution? Yes, absolutely, and we will get to that.

Here are 5 ways the Solstice Pod can benefit your organization:

The Solstice Pod itself is easy to setup, transport, and redeploy. There’s a power cord, a couple USB ports, and an HDMI cable. It is a small form factor device, so it easily mounts behind flat panels, or on/under tables. The easy setup will save your IT department (or AV integrator) the headaches that come with installing hardware that requires a hornet’s nest of cords to operate.

More importantly, the Solstice Pod will save time for those who use it for meetings. The device itself boots up in seconds, and users connect – either via the Solstice app or by a web browser – in seconds (not minutes) to begin sharing their digital content, such as PDF’s and JPEG’s, applications like MS Excel and Word, web content from their internet browsers, and anything else visible on their device by mirroring their desktop in real-time on the display.

2. The Solstice Pod gives you the peace of mind that your IP is secure.

One of the main talking points revolving around BYOD or ’bring your own device’ is security. Security not only for the data being stored on the user’s device, but also for the overall network. Memory sticks are not ideal conduits when dealing with secure information. They can easily become lost and end up in the wrong hands. They can also be used to transport all sorts of bad stuff (malware, viruses, etc.).

The Solstice Pod is a standalone device that allows users to share pixels to the screen wirelessly. This means no memory sticks are required. This also means that no data is being transferred or stored on the Pod (pixels only leave the client devices and hit the network to then appear on the shared display).

The Pod can be connected to an existing network, where there are numerous security settings in the dashboard (including network access), or you can use it without a network cable since the unit ships with wireless access point capabilities. This means that you can have guests to your office collaborate alongside corporate users in a meeting space without giving the guests network access and without sacrificing network security. Alternative, you can give guest users access to a network where your IP is not stored, such as a guest network. The Pod gives you that level of control and security, which leads to the next benefit for your organization.

3. The Solstice Pod is flexible and configurable, adapting to how and where you need to use it.

Based on the Solstice software architecture, the Solstice Pod is designed for flexible deployment options with configurable base port, bandwidth usage, security modes, and much more. And since the Solstice Pod does not require access to a network, you can use it in an existing conference room, a huddle space, or take it with you anywhere where you may be traveling where you will have access to a display. As mentioned before, the Pod itself is small, easy to transport, and only requires a few cables to connect to a display and start a secure meeting anywhere.

As well as being adaptable, the Pod is also multi-functional. Whether you are giving a presentation, leading or moderating a group discussion, or collaborating openly among peers in a meeting – the Solstice Pod seamlessly serves the requirements for any type of meeting. The Pod has different session and access modes to serve every use case. All of these modes can be changed easily based on admin configuration, either within the native app, from the shared display (requires a mouse connected to the Pod), or from any web browser with access to the Pod’s network. When the Pod is used for a presentation or for moderating a discussion, simply select the moderator mode. In moderator mode, moderator users connect using the moderator password and control what content is shared on-screen. Guest users must be approved by a moderator user to join the session. And when guests share content during the session, moderators will receive a thumbnail preview notification and can approve or reject the shared content before it posts to the display. This moderation mode goes beyond one-to-many control to allow for more flexible use cases and more distributed hierarchy for more granular and natural flow of information.

The Pod also features security measure to ensure that only those present in the collaborative setting, like a meeting, can connect and share content to the display. These options include setting a password that can included in the meeting invite to attendees, or enabling a screen key, a short code visible on the display that must be entered on the user device to gain access to the session. A session can also be closed off to any new attendees at any time when all invited participants have connected.

For less for meetings and huddle spaces, open mode allows for anyone with network access to connect quickly and easily, without having to enter a password or screen key.

Meetings happen frequently, so why not make the most of them? The benefits of using the Solstice Pod in your meetings are obvious when in use. Not only can meeting attendees share an unlimited amount of content, they also have the ability to organize this content by stacking it, changing the layout, or moving it off screen – the same way they would innately interacted paper on table before the technology made its way into the meeting room. This approach to collaboration allows those in attendance to not only easily share nearly any form of content from their devices; it also allows attendees to create context for the shared content in order to make sense of the meeting subject, improving decision-making and meeting results.

So what does this all mean?

The Solstice Pod:

Eliminates the cables, wires, and needless complexity of deployment

Provides enterprise class security features that make it a product your AV integrator and IT department will appreciate equally

Provides organizations with a software solution which is equally as adaptable and multi-use as the hardware that it is written on

Removes the barriers created by obsolete technology to create a more enriched collaborative environment for meetings in all different types of organizations

Try Solstice software free for 30 days

Please complete the form below to access your free 30-day software trial. If you have questions about the Solstice software trial program, you can contact us at customerrelations@mersive.com. Thank you for your interest in Solstice.